Tapestries of Life
Women's Work, Women's Consciousness, and the Meaning of Daily Experience
University of Massachusetts Press
Tapestries of Life proposes a way of putting women at the center of our thinking by structuring it out of the dailiness of women's lives. The focus is on women of diverse races, classes, ages, and geographic regions in the United States. Aptheker draws upon the works of women writers, poets, artists, dramatists, dancers, musicians, and academics as well as the words of women factory workers, domestics, and agricultural laborers. She explores how to promote balance in a system that institutionalizes class, race, and gender inequities at every level.
Aptheker weaves together the voices of women survivors of the Holocaust and of the U.S. concentration camps for Japanese Americans, Chicana cannery workers and southern cotton-mill girls, older lesbians and elderly Jews, Afro-American women in slavery and contemporary Afro-American writers, and others, in order to explore women's ways of seeing. Her analyses of oral histories, novels, legends, poetry, and art show how we can use these records of women's consciousnesses to challenge conventional accounts of women's and men's lives.'—Women's Review of Books
'Aptheker's eloquent defense of women takes its place within an ongoing argument over the meaning of gender in history, and as such will be required reading for feminist scholars.'—New Directions for Women
'Aptheker has recaptured, I think, the spirit of the women's movement as we first knew it in the 1970s. After all the academicism, the jargonization of feminist language, the bitterness of political infighting, the dividing of even feminist women in the workplace, the wounds from battles fought with the very ones we have loved, [she has] reminded me of why we have been doing it all.'—Frontiers
'An interesting an important introduction to a crucial discourse, i.e., what are the ways in which women as a gender view the world differently from men and in what ways can women use this knowledge to build a humane culture?'—Choice
'A balanced, caring work . . . that should speak to women of all ethnic and racial groups and of all political and sexual persuasions.'—Kirkus Reviews
Bettina Aptheker teaches women's studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is author of Woman's Legacy: Essays on Race, Sex, and Class in American History, published by the University of Massachusetts Press.
